Big news :
Bter got hacked. 50 million NXT. They are talking about rolling back the NXT blockchain.
Bter, Poloniex and Cryptsy have either frozen their NXT operations or froze their entire exchange. I think DGEX is not far behind unless it froze operations already.
Only place left to move funds around is into assets. There are bigger assets but the only thing with holding power if NXT price were to free fall is hypothetically convertible coins like NEM and Ora
I honestly feel like my outlook on crypto has changed after the Bter hack. I'm not much of a trader these days, so I don't normally keep large sums on exchanges, but a couple of days before the hack I had deposited a LARGE proportion of my stash on Bter so I could 'simplify' my portfolio into a small number of long term investments, and when I first heard news about what was going on I honestly thought I would never see my funds again. If NXT and Bter both imploded I would have lost the vast bulk of my crypto assets (over 90%), so needless to say I was freaking out severely.
It was a life changing moment for me in many ways, and I was already in a reflective mood as I'd been to a funeral of a dear friend earlier that day. A couple of years ago I was really struggling financially, and my family always lived hand-to-mouth, and while we were always happy, I could never afford to buy things like new clothes for my wife and kids, or go on holidays. We survived, but only just.
Then I discovered bitcoin, and my financial situation got a lot better. After a couple of years I was comfortable enough to do something like spend ~10 bitcoins on trying to bootstrap the ORA 'experiment'. I wasn't exactly 'rich', but I wasn't poor & struggling like a I was pre 2012 either, and for the first time in my adult life I felt like I didn't have to worry about the 'future'. I thought I had enough 'emergency' savings to keep me and my family out of trouble for the rest of our lives.
It's hard to explain how I felt when people started talking about rolling back the NXT blockchain (panic, fear, desperation), but for a while it looked like that was a real possibility, and IMO if that had happened both Bter & NXT would be gone now. When Jean-Luc posted a link for the rolled back version of the NXT client, and many notable & respected NXT'ers were arguing in favour of rolling back I thought it was game-over for NXT. In that moment I contemplated being poor again, and while I didn't like it, I realised I would still be OK, but obviously depressed, and angry with myself for leaving myself vulnerable. What if ...
The great thing about having money is you don't need to 'worry' about money for the day-to-day living expenses anymore, and you can focus on 'money' from a different perspective. Once you've got enough money to satisfy your basic needs for living, money becomes 'potential energy' that you can use to do 'things', and that's cool, and that's the big difference between being poor and being rich. If a rich person just sits on their wealth then it's wasted potential to do things.
When I was contemplating being 'poor' again that's what instantly came to mind. If Bter & NXT collapsed I would loose my ability to use the money I had made from crypto to do things, like helping to bootstrap ORA. I know I can still be happy as a relatively poor guy in a western country in good health with a loving family, but a poor guy can't harness resources like a wealthy guy. I'm not rich, but by crypto standards I think I'm probably better off than most.
Crypto coins in a wallet are like cash in a box under your bed, or oil in a barrel, or seeds in grain shed. There's potential there for sure, but unless you take that potential and harness it into something useful, what's the point? How much idle resources do you need to feel secure? If you deposit money in a bank someone else can borrow it and use it, but crypto in a wallet is like money under your bed. It's just sitting there protecting you from a rainy day, but that's all it's doing.
By all reports Satoshi has 1 Million bitcoins stashed in a wallet 'under his bed'. That's such a lot of potential, and far more than he needs to feel 'comfortable' and secure. So what's the point of having it? I don't really know the answer, but in my much much smaller case, the recent events made me realise having some crypto wealth is great for security, but beyond a certain level most of the current crypto coins are 'potential' but nobody is using them for their full potential yet. I hope ORA will be used to make people's lives better, not just stashed under the bed making us feel more secure in case of a rainy day.
